Thursday, December 07, 2006

Making Out in Japanese


I recently purchased a beat-up little book secondhand. Its called Making Out in Japanese, and is a guide to useful Japanese slang. I like to spend large amounts of my free time at school browsing the pages and chuckling heartily to myself. The slang is set up by section: eating, chit-chat, girlfriends, breaking up. You know, all the good stuff. Though each phrase is supposedly independant of the next, it seems to me that the phrases are arranged on the page in a certain order... the order that they think someone might want to use them in. Some of the series of phrases are hilarious, and make you wonder who exactly they are targeting as a core audience. Take this series, for instance:

Aishiteta wa
I loved you

zutto anata o omotteru
I will always love you

honto ni aishiteru-nara, `sashimi taberu?`-tte kikanai de
If you really love me, youll stop asking me to eat sashimi.

Moo, aishitenai kara, denwa bango kaeru
I really dont love you anymore, so Im going to change my phone number

tokoro de, nihon no kekkon-shiki ikura kakaru no?
By the way, how much does a Japanese wedding cost?

yameta!
Forget it!

Theres a twisted logic behind that pattern, dont you think?

Sometimes I stumble across a phrase that I imagine would seem really random to a reader who doesnt live in Japan. But after youve lived here, oh yes, you will quickly agree that said phrase is a necessity. Example:

Nanda yo kono babaa!?!
Whats this old woman doing!?!

You will have to come visit me yourself to figure out what exactly it is that old women here do to produce so many !?!?s.

3 comments:

jean/Mum said...

Hmmmm...definitely sounds suspicious! glad you learning such useful phrases! Mum

a.shoe said...

it's difficult to explain just how hard i'm laughing. what is even the main focus of said laughter? the strange old woman cartoon? imagining her doing something odd? or is it just the fact that this book prepares one to ask the apparently inevitable question?
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Mei-ting said...

i've seen that book for chinese too. haven't looked at it yet, but now i'm intrigued...